Honolulu
September 18, 1970
People often ask what is my favorite place after so much travel in the Pacific Islands, It is almost impossible to answer; there are too many different kinds of natural beauty, politics, problems, and interesting people.
But no islands in this largest of oceans have more off-beat intrigue than the New Hebrides at the heart of oceanic Melanesia, west of Fiji, north of New Caledonia, south of the Solomons, and very much East of Eden.
You are there only one day before you think, “Somebody should write a musical about this place.” Then you remember somebody has. It was called South Pacific, and some scenes from the Broadway hit and James Michener’s novel linger — the rusting remains of great military bases fringed by jungle; French planters, some greying and handsome; a few Tonkinese, as shrewd but more sophisticated than Bloody Mary; colonial Englishmen who could have been coast watchers; even a distant island that stands high and beautiful then fades in cloud and shadow so that some say it was Michener’s Bali Ha’i.
As always, much of the color and confusion stems from the fact this is the world’s only condominium government, administered jointly by France and Great Britain in styles that range from joie de vivre to peaceful and competitive coexistence to quiet desperation, Outsiders find it funnier than the local folk.
There is much more, of course. The mixture includes enough lovely scenery for anyone with South Sea dreams, and an array of Melanesian culture dramatized by the fact some 75,000 natives are said to speak over 200 different languages. To this must be added the color of lingering British empire, a heavy overlay of French culture and ambition, plus a rich history now taking a new turn with the arrival of American land subdividers from Hawaii and a new philosophy that foresees the New Hebrides as a Pacific Bahamas, a tax-free haven for foreign firms and perhaps even a location for think industries.
There are a lot of nice dreams afloat in these islands. The realities include more flies than you have ever seen, and the future hopes and demands of a New Hebridean people just starting to come of political age. A small shadow of black power already builds over this paradise of white free enterprise. The result could be serious conflict, or a new kind of happy cooperation,
The Many Islands
It’s hard for many people to get a focus on the New Hebrides from afar. Some have heard of the two main islands — Efate with the Condominium capital of Vila, and Espiritu Santo, largest island in the group, big U.S. military staging area in World War II, and now the site of American subdivisions that may have an impact on local lifestyle as well as the landscape.
But the New Hebrides is more than that; there is, in fact, a diversity that can’t be done justice in a paper such as this, for there are 13 large and 60 small islands with a total land area of 5,700 square miles, somewhat smaller than Hawaii. These islands stretch 450 miles, and to the north include the small Banks and Torres groups.
The result is a procession of primitive island beauty and diversity. The range runs from tiny coral islands (including a few with small groups of Polynesians) to smoking volcanoes that seem to spring from the sea to rolling mountains of jungle and grassy upland.
Children use old U.S. military pool on Efate
There in Melanesian villages women still work gardens with simple tools but often shop at a local cooperative. Men ponder the concept of government preached by Condominium officials; the men also continue to raise pigs with fine circle tusks and ceremonial, almost religious, value; and they fashion masks and other totems of dark, hideous beauty, primitive symbols of rank, fertility, and resurrection. Smiling black children go off to simple schools run by dedicated missionaries who have done much in these islands. And here and there white planters, mostly French, still live lordly but lonely lives in big old houses set in vast groves of palm trees.
Within this general picture, the range of language and customs changes, not just from island to island but from section to section. Pentacost Island, for example, is the home of the land divers: men and boys prove their courage by diving from towers up to 80 feet high. Their ankles are tied with springy vines that pull taut and almost stop the jumper just as he lands head first in the soft dirt. It’s o great show, even if somewhat commercialized by tour groups, admission charges, and the fact the jumpers now wear clothes in deference to shutterbugs and other visitors.
Less changed are the rites of the Big Nambas on Malekula Island. There in a mountaintop village pigs and yams are bartered for women, and husbands reward good wives by having friends knock out a couple of her teeth amid great ceremony.
On Tanna Island there is the Jon Frum movement. It has aspects of other Melanesian “cargo cults,” native movements built on the belief that some reincarnated deity will arrive bearing great wealth in material goods — trucks, refrigerators, food, cigarettes, etc. The Jon Frum belief got a great boost when the affluent Americans arrived in World War II. Once fringing on violence, it is now more quietly anti-missionary, anti-white, and anti-government to the frustration of education and other administration programs,
It might seem the offbeat is the norm in the New Hebrides, and that may be true from an outsider’s view. But the people have a way of life that by and large satisfies them. And as dramatic as the cultural diversity are the trends in politics, social advancement, and economics, which are really just starting to change these islands in significant ways,
A Place In History
It says something that the New Hebrides are closer to French New Caledonia to the south than to the British Solomons to the north. Both national influences are clearly present, but it is the French, which has come to predominate, especially in the urban centers.
An Efate village
This is the current product of a relatively brief but complex history.
The first European discovery of these islands came in 1606 when the Spanish explorer Pedro Fernandez de Quiros sighted part of the Banks Group and later landed on Espiritu Santo and founded an ill-fated settlement called New Jerusalem. It was 160 years later before another European, the French navigator Bouganville, sailed through part of the islands.
But, as with so many other Pacific areas, it was Britain’s Captain James Cook who first touched and charted most of the group in 1774 and gave them the inappropriate name. Five years later Captain Bligh sailed by the Banks Islands in his famous voyage after being cast adrift by the Bounty mutineers.
It wasn’t until the 19th Century that the tragic era of New Hebridean history began. Sandalwood was discovered in 1825, and some who came to exploit this fragrant product for the China trade were arrogant and unscrupulous. The natives fought back, and among those massacred (and often eaten) were the first European missionaries to try to land in the group, including a famous figure, the Rev. John Williams from Polynesia.
Gradually and painfully, mission influence was established and spread. But as the sandalwood ran out in the mid 1800s, the worst traders turned to blackbirding, recruiting native labor for plantations in Fiji and Queensland. The result was a bitter era, marked by mass kidnapping of simple native villagers, decimation from European diseases, sometimes deliberately introduced by spiteful traders, and growing numbers of British and French settlers who sometimes bought land with gin or guns.
Inevitably, the British and French governments were involved by various pleas and protests from businessmen, missionaries, and Australians who felt Britain should annex these and many other Pacific islands. Mixed in was the fact Great Britain and France faced each other on many sticky issues around the world.
The logical result was the illogical Condominium, agreed upon first in 1886 as a joint naval commission and amended by other treaties between the two nations in 1906 and 1914. It is an odd system, indeed. But some suggest that such were conditions in the early 1900s that it might have helped save the peace in Europe, or at least helped preserve the British-French alliance against Germany going into World War I. That is a lot to say for such a remote little place, but it makes for a pleasant thought amid some grim history.
Vila Harbor from French Residency
The Isle o f Efate
Vila, the Condominium capital on the island of Efate, is one of the Pacific’s pleasant surprises. It is a French town set in a countryside largely missionized by the British. Fiji Airways serves the New Hebrides by propjet on its run from Suva to New Guinea. But I came up from New Caledonia in an old French DC-4 that droned along pleasantly in the morning sunshine with windows vibrating and oil leaks glistening on the silver cowling, just like they must have when similar (or maybe the same) planes made the run in the busy days of World War II. Recently the French have started flying Caravelle jets.
You land at a grassy airfield, go through British-French customs, and drive into town along dusty roads past vast palm groves kept park like by grazing cattle who act as living lawnmowers.
Vila harbor bursts upon you, deep and blue with sweeping vistas framed in a couple of handsome islets close to shore. The town itself struggles along a narrow edge of shoreline, its secondary streets climbing a steep hillside amid flowering bougainvillea and old buildings, Its growth is reflected in a variety of building styles, including old colonial, now concrete horrors pushed right to the narrow sidewalk on narrow streets, old native bars, and a few handsome new structures which residents consider “terribly modern.”
The people are often as colorful and varied. Legally, all of the more than 5,000 non-New Hebrideans in the 80,000 population are classed as either French (over 3,500) or British (less than 1,500). But the French group includes scatterings of Wallis Islanders, Tahitians, and a couple hundred Tonkineses left after thousands of other such plantation workers and small shopkeepers were returned to North Vietnam in the 1960s (thus avoiding what could have been a serious racial-social-political problem). The British group includes a few dozen economically powerful Chinese, a variety of Australians and New Zealanders, a few Americans, and several hundred Fijian, Gilbertese, and Tongan workers.
Some of the flavor of this hit me when I arrived at mid-morning at the hotel lounge-bar-and-registration desk. The registration clerk was a Fijian girl wearing a Samoan dress. A couple of Tongan workers walked by. Plotting strategy over a coffee table and beer were two Australian traveling salesmen in shorts, knee socks, and ties. The smiling black-mammy-waitress insisted I have a drink with two Solomon Islander friends who came with me on the plane. The bartender was a handsome Italian immigrant. At the bar a neat young New Hebridean, apparently a homosexual, smiled sweetly. Beside him a red-haired French floozy from Noumea, obviously lovely once but now fat and foul, alternately muttered curses and sang like Edith Piaf as she drank and smoked away at what clearly was a hell of a hangover, Outside, a lovely part-French mother in bikini and see-through shift walked by holding her little boy’s hand. And across the street a Chinese shopkeeper smiled at a new mixture of transistors from Japan and canned goods from China he had put in the window.
The System
It’s hard not to like a place that starts you off like that. But it is not always easy to understand the system behind it. For the mixture involves three sets of laws and administrations (British, French, and Joint Condominium), three currencies (French, British, and Australian), separate British and French police forces, even both British and metric weights and measures. The joint administration covers such functions as public works, ports, agriculture, customs, and inland revenue. But such vital functions as medical services and education are largely divided among British and French systems.
There are separate courts for French and British subjects, a separate court for New Hebridean native affairs, and the Joint Court, which deals mostly in civil matters of common internal concern, notably land.
The British and French now manage to balance out their interests without benefit of the neutral president called for in the Joint Court arrangement. And no wonder, it one is to judge by the early setup as reported by Dr. Douglas Oliver (of Harvard and the University of Hawaii) in his basic handbook, The Pacific Islands:
“The first Judge President, who presided over French and British national judges, was, according to the terms of the treaty, appointed to his office by the King of Spain. He was truly neutral, having understood little French, less English, and no Melanesian; but this was no additional handicap, because he was also deaf.”
Stories like that have enhanced the Condominium’s reputation as “The Pandemonium.” Not without reason one gets the feeling this is a place that for years was both over-governed in a ceremonial sense and neglected in terms of New Hebridean needs. High on the hill behind Vila are the separate but equal colonial headquarters — the modern French administration building reflecting the obvious fact of more affluence than the old but attractive British structure. Both nations are now in a struggle for influence among the New Hebrideans, but officials of each point out that if it had not been for the missions even basic education would have been neglected until the last decade.
Yet the system has been working better. Most important in this evolution is the 13-year-old Advisory Council; a legislative body of limited power but growing influence presided over by the British and French Commissioners. It is made up of four official and 20 unofficial members, of whom 10 are Melanesians, five British, and five French. Of the unofficial group, 12 are nominated by the two powers and eight elected by indirect means involving men only. Because of the work of the Protestant missions, the elected Melanesians are more British oriented. But in politics as in education the French have been making impressive efforts to catch up in recent years.
Vila’s main street. Condominium Government building at left.
The Subtleties
“What you must realize, of course,” said a British official one day, “is that the subtleties are more important than the actual system. There are a lot of letters and memos, duly translated in both languages, even joint letters. But more important there is a great deal of not-on-paper administration… For years we fenced with the French; now things are better. Still some basic differences in policy goals and ways of doing things remain.”
The situation extends to the New Hebrideans. One who works for the British administration arrived back late for a mid-afternoon appointment and greeted me with an apology. “Sorry if I seem a bit drowsy. One-of the French chaps we work with is leaving and we had a long lunch. You know how that food, wine, and brandy are.”
On another level, the French Resident Commissioner left for a new assignment last year with warm words for British cooperation and friendship. He also spoke to the people in pidgin, saying in part. ”Now, long any island we me go work long em, bambai hat blong me I happy me tink bout long ol year we me spendem long New Hebrides.’
Beyond such instances, however, are continuing differences and shifts of policy that make for a situation still in flux.
British policy has seemed a mixture of altruism and economic limitations in keeping with the missionary influence and the fading empire. “Our goal is to help the New Hebrideans get trained, take over more positions, and decide what they want to do,” said one official.
“The British went out,” said an Australian resident late last year. “They would leave this place with unseemly haste if they could get the French to pull out with them — but they can’t.”
Two new factors have come to bear in the past year. One is a British study suggesting the New Hebrides might have a future as a tax-free business haven like the Bahamas. The other is the election victory of the Conservatives who are considered less eager than Labor to shed colonial burdens.
In contrast to a basic British willingness to go, the French have been suspected of wanting to hold on indefinitely.
“They want to make this part of New Caledonia,” a longtime European resident said of the French.
“That is not so,” said a French official when asked. “We do not want the New Hebrides to be part of France, as we consider New Caledonia and Tahiti.”
At the same time he and others stressed any independence is a long ways off: “It would be a crime to grant it now, a caricature of independence… There is no national consciousness, not enough economic development, education, native leadership, or political growth… Perhaps in 20 years…”
The French were slower in pushing education and political development, and as a result are behind the British. But by everyone’s testimony the French are working hard and spending considerable sums on education and other programs to catch up in the struggle for influence and future political orientation.
There is, of course, a wide range of views: a young French mission priest is more liberal than an old planter. And diverse feelings are evident among the New Hebrideans. “In the villages it is mostly uneducated apathy; we have trouble keeping local government councils going,” said a young official. “But some of the chiefs are pretty good at playing the British and French off against each other to get benefits.”
Some New Hebrideans in the towns are quite articulate and critical. Said one: “They keep telling us we benefit by having the two governments, the French more in urban affairs, the British more in rural areas. But really what we have is a lot of waste, delay, and nonsense. Instead of three governments there should be one with New Hebrideans more in control. That’s why our people have been thinking more of politics. The Advisory Council’s next step is to become a legislative council with more power.”
Nobody’s predicting a revolution or even very rapid political evolution in the New Hebrides. If more self-government seems logical, any drive for independence is still over the horizon. Still, there are emerging elements that may bring change faster than many now think It Is debatable, but some think Americans could be a political factor because of their growing interest in land, a most important subject to be discussed later.) At any rate, high among the elements bound to shape the future is a blend of old and new economics.
The Economics of It
There are elements of paradox in the New Hebrides economic situation: Backers stress it’s “a last bastion of free enterprise.” yet there has been relatively little private economic activity, and if outsiders are welcomed they also face a maze of regulations. The Condominium was founded partly on reaction against “blackbirding,” but in a much more humane way the recruiting of labor to work elsewhere is again an issue. There is an abundance of good, unused land; still here as elsewhere land is the most delicate issue with the island people.
Economic statistics are tricky, especially since the British national budget is prepared in Australian dollars, the French budget in special New Hebridean francs, and the Condominium budget, by law, in British pounds, which are not used as local currency. However, about half of the total expenses has come from British and French grants.
There is no income tax, except for British nationals working for their government. There are also no business income or property taxes, although various licenses must be bought and fees paid. This has special appeal, but import duties make up part of the economic gap — which means foreign food and other prices can be relatively high. And that has other implications. Said a longtime Australian resident as we sipped beer at a golf course: “The French go up the wall when you mention income taxes; they go mad. Yet the per capita taxes as taken from duties and other fees are $38 a year. That’s not only under taxation for me but its also hardly fair to charge me the same as Bilroad here,” he concluded nodding to a pleasant New Hebridean barman who smiled back.
Europeans and some Orientals control most of the business and larger opportunities for the future in the New Hebrides. However, in rural regions there is considerable native activity. Copra has made up almost half the islands’ export income; labor shortages and other factors have meant the fading of European planters in favor of New Hebrideans who now produce the bulk of the coconut meet for market. In addition, there are some 100 native co-operatives that help market copra and other products and run village stores. Here again the British have been far more active in the past, but the French are moving to catch up.
Besides copra with its uncertain market future, the traditional economy is a mixture. Another quarter of the export revenue has come from the sale of frozen fish caught by Japanese fishermen and stored at a large European-Japanese freezer facility on Espiritu Santo.
Copra plantation with fenced golf course green
Vila street scene
A French manganese mine on Efate has operated periodically over the years. Timber, cacao, coffee, and trochus shell each contribute a small percentage of income. Many hope for big mineral finds.
The New Hebrides’ best export prospect now, however, seems to be beef and food crops, for as nearby French New Caledonia is increasingly occupied with its nickel mining boom, the potential grows for the New Hebrides to become its food basket. Where cattle were formerly mostly a convenience for keeping down the grass under plantation coconut trees, now they, not copra–, have become the major “crop.” In addition, thousands of other acres are being cleared and planted for ranching.
Such rural economics make for a pleasant place. The New Hebrides does not lack for low income jobs, in fact, one continuing problem is so many workers being lured off by the considerably higher wages in New Caledonia, The countryside is pleasant, Even the barbed wire fences around the copra-cattle plantations are often made with posts of thin tree branches which when stuck in the ground sprout and form neat lines of new trees around grassy groves.
But there is the potential for much more social change and disruption in what might be called the new outsider industries.
Since the New Hebrides is still well off the major air routes, tourism remains an offbeat experience with much potential. Brief cruise ship visits have been the biggest item. In addition, the unreliable statistics indicate somewhere over 5,000 persons — tourists, businessmen, etc. — arrived last year for brief stays. Hotels in town range from neat concrete to old quonset huts. But a couple of now ones with “South Sea” atmosphere have been built by outlying beaches, and the small tourist industry is starting to grow. Tourism is officially encouraged, and the natives are friendly, although the established Europeans are not wild about the idea of too many tourists.
What may be more significant then traditional tourism, however, was explained by a European businessman in the New Hebrides. “The biggest development in the past year or two has been a change in British attitudes. Before they were geared strictly towards getting out. But now they realize the French aren’t about to leave. So the British are becoming more agreeable to development with foreign business. British officials have looked at Bermuda and the Bahamas and now some talk about promoting the New Hebrides as a major Pacific tax and financial haven for international companies.”
How far this will go in a Pacific world where many islands are looking for new opportunities is uncertain. But by mid year an Australian firm of solicitors had set up an office in Vila and reportedly incorporated more than 30 foreign firms. A San Francisco investment firm also was selling the New Hebrides as an income and business tax-free potential “Switzerland of the Pacific.”
The outsider development that has stirred the New Hebrides the most so far, however, has been that of a Hawaii land developer who brought the philosophy of American subdivisions to these South Pacific islands. The result has been a mixture of high risk and high profit, controversy, and new thinking on the value and potential of these and other remote Pacific islands. That story goes with Espiritu Santo.
The Santo Story
If Vila on Efate is a sophisticated French “city” of perhaps 4,000, Espiritu Santo is another kind of place. There the urban atmosphere is a mixture of new frontier, scruffy South Sea charm, and ghosts of World War II. Luganville, the main town of perhaps 2,500 residents, straggles along the Segond Channel for a half-dozen miles, and as the local folk say, everything is on the outskirts of town.
Santo’s ruins of war
Santo, the name usually used for the entire island and the town, is the biggest in the New Hebrides group. Shaped like a crab claw and divided by a mountain range, heavy jungle, and streams through fertile valleys, it is 76 miles long and 45 miles wide.
But Santo is one of those places that adds up to much more then its vital statistics.
One of the reasons is the war. Anyone with imagination (or access to Michener) can picture how it must have been. In a few short weeks in 1942, tens of thousands of Americans poured into a little trading post. They built miles of road, vast airfields, great docks, and sprawling complexes of barracks, workshops, and warehouses. The natives moved inland, some to work on hundreds of acres taken and planted for vegetable farms to feed the troops. Shrewd Tonkinese plantation laborers from Vietnam worked fringe businesses, and the character of Bloody Mary was born. So maybe was Bali Ha’i in the fleeting view men got of Aoba Island seen in the rain showers offshore to the east. In short, Santo became an American serviceman city complete with character and dreams. The boom lasted three years, then faded in a period of postwar surplus property affluence.
Now there are dim memories. The roads are still surprisingly good, and so are parts of the airfields. A few of the old quonset huts and other buildings are still being used. But most are long gone, and what remains are bits of scrap, rusting remains in the damp undergrowth, and docks crumbling in the wash of a quiet tide. On the outskirts, folks point to the spots where the transport President Coolidge and the USS Tucker went down, victims of misplaced American mines or bad navigation.
And there is Million Dollar Point and its story: At the end of the war, the Americans had dozens of new “surplus” vehicles, from jeeps to building cranes, and warehouses full of tools, food, and clothes. Under U.S. law, it could not be brought home, and negotiations were opened to sell it to the French. Here versions vary. Some say the Americans were rigid and unrealistic, others that the French stalled and hoped to get the lot for virtually nothing. Whatever, negotiations fell through, and an embittered American decision was made to dump everything into the sea.
So a ramp was built at a point on the channel where the shore drops to deep water. For days loaded vehicles were either pushed in or driven to the edge, the drivers jumping clear at the last moment. Hundreds of tons of valuable and useful goods were thus destroyed in a final show of wartime waste. People still shake their heads when they tell the story.
There are two sequels:
Years later a small freighter moved in right off Million Dollar Point to harvest the underwater scrap metal. But they didn’t account for a crane sticking up near the surface. Riding the swells, the ship came down on the crane, poked a hole in its bottom and sank. So now it sits, superstructure visible above the surface, the crowning glory on one of the world’s more expensive junk heaps.
Million Dollar Point
For years Million Dollar Point served as both landmark and town rubbish dump. Recently, however, it was sold to someone in Hawaii as part of one of Santo’s new U.S.-style subdivisions. So Million Dollar Point is back in American hands.
In Santo, the Condominium operates on the same dual formula but with somewhat less formality than in Vila. Separate but equal modest wooden buildings, separated by a pole flying the two flags, house the French and British residencies. In my visit, the top British official was an urbane veteran South Pacific colonial servant who looked for all the world like a greying movie star. His French counterpart was an attractive, intense young man who spoke with great speed and frankness (“This place has been neglected, but now we are very serious.”).
Down the road are the separate police stations, with the two forces attired in different yet equally colorful colonial uniforms -and, it would seem, in different attitudes.
“We get along well, but there are differences in approach,” says a British official. “The French are more inclined to leave things alone and take care of their people. We see it more as the idea of developing local people to eventually run it themselves.”’
There are even separate crime statistics. “We have few cases of dishonesty, I suppose, because there is more than enough work and salaries are quite high.” said a British officer. “In fact, about 90 per cent of our cases involve drinking or fighting. Alcohol is a real problem, and one of the special hazards is that drunks have a habit of going to sleep on the road. It’s quite dangerous.”’
Alcohol is a hazard for the European population as well, but it also seems to be quite a comfort for many of them. In short, Santo has its share of good drinkers and bad drunks. You see a number of them at the Hotel Corsica, a quonset hut and plywood relic of U.S. Navy days restored in recent years with the aid of paint, flowers, and imagination. Like such wartime vintage structures as the Royal Palauan Hotel on Koror, the Corsica is a classic in South Sea atmosphere — only cleaner and with French food that at times hits quality.
The parade of people is fascinating: not many islanders — you find them in other bars — but a good range of old and new colonial types:
At the hotel bar, you meet a salty French planter, a former Foreign Legionnaire down from his home in the Banks Islands for treatment of a bad log wound suffered when he shot himself while crocodile hunting in the Solomons; he jokes and swears up a storm while downing glass after glass of milky pernod and water.
Sidewalk shopping outside modern Santo supermarket
Drinking beer beside him is an aging British official, a veteran of Malaya and Africa colonial days. The Australian hotel manager has a ritual for introducing him to newcomers. “And this is Charles,” says the manager, adding: “It’s Sir Charles, isn’t it?” The British official fingers his moustache and says modestly, “Local title, actually.” To which the wounded little Frenchman suggests any such title was awarded for chasing native women.
And so it goes. In the dining room, a greying French planter who looks like the lead in South Pacific dines with his young and lovely Chinese wife and a chubby little daughter he obviously adores. At another table are a couple of Americans hoping to buy a plantation. Off to one side is a prosperous looking Japanese businessman entertaining two less urbane countrymen from the big ocean fishing base down the coast. He’s having trouble ordering lobster from the New Hebridean waitress who speaks only pidgin or French. “Robbster, robbster,” he says making his hands look like crawling claws. She laughs, and you wonder how much luck he would have if he knew French and said, “Wrongouste.”
There are few Americans living in the New Hebrides so far. Some have had mixed fortune or achieved dubious distinction:
One couple from Hawaii ran into trouble with Now Hebridean villagers on Efate, an unfortunate and perhaps unnecessary mix-up over access rights on land they bought. They were virtually forced to leave the islands. Back in Hawaii now, they urge prospective buyers to take “a good, strong look” at the land and political situation, including rising native nationalism.
During my stay, the American image on Santo had suffered a bit from the visit of an aristocratic-looking woman who had passed herself off as the wife of a two-star general from Honolulu. She left owing hundreds of dollars to the hotel and merchants.
Then there was a fellow, also from Hawaii, who was making himself known as a bad drinker. He has a special fondness for sticky Grand Marnier liqueur, starting off in the morning mixing it with milk and switching to straight belts as the day droned on. One story was that he managed to consume some 126 bottles in 90 days, enough to float a million crepes suzette.
But the best known American in the New Hebrides is a land developer-businessman from Hawaii, He has made a lot of money but invested much of it in further ventures in the New Hebrides where he now lives. In far more important ways, that, too, makes him controversial.
Americans and Land
Back in the mid 1960s Eugene Peacock, a little known Honolulu businessman with land development, construction, and securities experience, went to the South Pacific looking for low cost housing prospects and other investment opportunities. He eventually found a run-down copra plantation with two spectacular beaches on a beautiful bay with the unromantic name of Hog Harbor, some 35 miles up the coast from Luganville on Santo. Peacock and his Hawaii associates, Amalgamated Land, Inc., bought the plantation for a reported $86,000 U.S. Most of it has since been subdivided into over 800 lots and sold, largely in Hawaii, for more then $3 million — minus, of course, sales and development costs. Since then Amalgamated has gone on to sell out another nearby subdivision of more then 700 lots for an additional $2 million at a place called Cape Queiros. Currently it is fast selling an even bigger subdivision, 1,200 house and industrial lots in an area called Palikula about three miles from Luganville.
One result has been to make Peacock a very prosperous man of growing importance in the New Hebrides (where he now lives most of the time and is much better known than in Hawaii). Besides the Santo subdivisions, his interests cover several projects on Efate, including a major cattle ranch, a housing project-subdivision just outside Vila, and various land holdings for later development.
More important is the fact that the American subdivisions have helped trigger a whole range of attitudes about the value of land, tourism and other development prospects, and the future of these semi-forgotten islands. Somebody was bound to come eventually; it just happened to be an American from Hawaii.
Developer Eugene Peacock
There are serious questions that can be raised about the future of land control and political development in the New Hebrides. But first it might be stressed that Peacock and associates are no fly-by-night operators. Nor is this necessarily some latter-day version of the “South Sea Bubble,” a disastrous experience in the 1880s when a French nobleman sold shares to gullible Frenchmen, Italians, and Belgians ‘in a mythical colony on New Ireland in the Bismark Archipelago; four shiploads of colonists went out and lasted less than two years in the face of malaria and native hostility.
The Santo subdivision sales have been registered as legitimate by the Hawaii State government officials who went to Santo. The land is there. Some of it is now in jungle thick enough to terrorize most Americans. Part of it is hot, ugly scrub or rocky coast. But there is also breath-taking beauty and a range of development possibilities that could be fulfilled.
Some of the first projects were oversold by people no longer associated with the operation. There was, for example, talk of a big international gambling casino. Some of the early literature had South See Bubble aspects about it, as the New Hebrides were pictured as a bucolic tax and trouble-free paradise on the verge of becoming a jet-age crossroads, “the Pacific’s newest playground” where pleasure to be found was only to be outdone by profits to be made. The newer brochures are naturally bullish but much more modest in projections. The developers are legally committed to roads, water, and power but they also stress long-range development hopes. Like Peacock, some aides want to live and work in the New Hebrides.
There are those who wonder why anyone would consider buying land they have never seen in the New Hebrides, some 3,000 miles away from tropical Hawaii with its own mythical lures. It’s a good question. The answer lies in a mixture of economics, environmental concerns, and escapist desires:
Sales have been phenomenally successful in the 50th State because land values there have risen so high so fast. Somebody from chilly Iowa or even California might balk at paying from $2,500 to $9,000 for an acre of land with a view near a beach, but in Hawaii it has proved an irresistible bargain for some. Perhaps the large majority of these original buyers will never see, much less settle in, the New Hebrides; they view it as a Hawaii-type land investment, and in three years some choice pieces are selling for over 50 per cent more than the original price.
Furthermore, the lure of the “unspoiled” South Seas grows as Hawaii like other areas faces the crowding and pollution so closely associated with progress. One can predict planning problems in parts of the New Hebrides, but the subdivision sales promotion stresses the idea of new communities with strict rules on building size and height, using materials and design in keeping with the area.
Escapists come in various forms* Hippies don’t find a warm welcome in the New Hebrides and few could afford the land prices. Still it is possible to envision an interesting variety of liberal free spirits, John Birch buccaneers and more simple retired folk being attracted. But it might not be as simple as they think for a variety of reasons, including still-limited opportunities, various protective regulations, and items that make the cost of living (not to mention travel) higher then might be anticipated. Every paradise has a price tag.
Still, looking at Santo today, it’s understandable how people would be intrigued with the old island dream. Take Hog Harbor, or as the French say more melodically, “Ogg Arboorr.” You drive out through a mixture of rain forest, copra plantations, even a golf course where the greens are fenced off to keep out the grazing cattle (and you get an extra stroke if you hit a pole or barbed wire or an especially wet cow dropping.) Along part of the road is the blue ocean and small green islands off shore. It is almost idyllic except for the large black flies, which land on you by the dozens whenever the car stops. (“A little Greek chorus of reality that’s always around,” said one Frenchman.)
Lokalee Beach
The American subdivision at Hog Harbor, named Lokalee Beach, begins beyond a few thatch native huts on a hill thick with under-brush and great vine-covered trees. The good coral road Winds down the other side of the hill, and you can see why people dream of tropical isles, and why they buy. For there is a pale green bay with deep blue water and long green islands farther out. On the fringes are dark forests, but the lower portion of the subdivision is nest palm grove rolling down to white sand beach. Peacock’s hotel, a modest bungalow-style operation, sits on the grassy slope behind the beach long ago named Lokalee. It is amid one-acre plots sold but undeveloped. Farther along the plantation road, around a wooded point sticking into the bay, is Champagne Beach, a palm-fringed crescent of white powder sand and calm water alive with bright fish. It is clearly one of the world’s more perfect small beaches, and Peacock has reserved it for later luxury hotel development.
What American Impact?
It’s anybody’s guess how many and what kind of Americans will show up in the New Hebrides in the next few years. But there is no doubt the subdivisions have added a new dimension to the situation. Some reluctant local Europeans had grudgingly accepted the idea of tourism, only to be hit with the more advanced and complicated concept of an American colony within a British-French Condominium, which is itself within a developing native population.
French officials have generally welcomed the potential American influx personified by Peacock. It is both in tune with their Western business development attitude and with any political ambition to keep the general status quo and remain,
The British, on the, other hand, have been cool, Some suggest that they would have blocked Peacock’s subdivision plans had they realized soon enough what he was up to. Until recently at least, their goal has been to eventually withdraw, leaving behind a system the native New Hebrideans could handle, The possibility of thousands of American residents, most of them deciding to live under British law, complicates that picture. Said one British official: “Peacock made a mistake when he first came here, proposing that more Americans would increase the present small percentage of Europeans and with it their influence. New Hebrideans don’t like to read such things.”
Non-official, local European attitudes on incoming Americans vary. Since few Americans are around, they are based mostly on hopes, fears, and developments elsewhere. Some welcome the idea of new money. But more hostile attitudes were expressed by a woman who has been to Hawaii and is connected with the travel business: “Why do Americans want to come here? They will ruin this like they have other places. Have they fouled up their own country so much they want to getaway from it? Then why not go to Hawaii? There is lots of land there on the outside islands, and it’s closer and lovelier than here.”
For balance, there was this view of an Australian woman at the British mission at Hog Harbor: “There could be problems, I suppose, if too many Americans come. But it could also be a good thing in terms of offering people jobs and in showing them a world they must learn to face and live with.”
New Hebridean attitudes also vary but generally are less firm. One village chief on Efate was eagerly going off to Fiji to learn how people there market handicrafts to tourists; tourism, he felt, offered more economic hope than digging yams or making copra.
However, when I said to an educated young New Hebridean woman on Santo, “The next time I come here there will probably be thousands of American tourists around,” she looked at me and said gravely: “I hope not because they might crush us like they have the colored people in the United States.”
The Land Question
Intertwined with the idea of a new American invasion that may or may not come is the problem of land. Here as elsewhere in the Pacific is the paradox of thousands of empty, potentially rich undeveloped acres owned by natives, yet with land considered one of the most pressing problems.
“One of the first things to realize is that 45 per cent of the land is alienated from native ownership,” says a British official. By far the biggest private owner is a big French corporation, Societe Francaise des Nouvelle Hebrides (SFNH) with some 200,000 acres. Next comes the Australian Commonwealth Government, which has control of 50,000 acres. Peacock lists his various developments to date as totaling about 6,000 acres.
The land problem comes in several parts:
One involves vague titles and native deeds, some acquired decades ago by unscrupulous Europeans in exchange for alcohol and guns. There was some unhappiness that Joint Court decisions in such cases favored Europeans and it was felt that a new land commission should decide.
But even where titles are clear — and the American subdivision land seems in this category — there are other questions.
One stems from the fact large tracts of alienated land, especially that of SFNH, lies undeveloped and attractive to nearby natives, some of whom feel it is basically theirs by natural rights anyway.
Still another side, minor so far but with potential to grow, centers on the attraction of past development: Europeans on Efate and Santo have some of the best locations in the developed coastal regions.
Mixed in now is a new factor, that land prices on choice parts of the coast on the main islands have shot up as owners anticipate either tourism or more American buyers. Some asking prices have gone up five or six times what they were two years ago. This holds dizzying prospects for European owners and speculators, but the benefits to New Hebrideans have yet to be demonstrated.
“It’s natural but kind of sad how people see everything in terms of money,” said an older European resident. “Some fellow from Hawaii was here and told me he felt $40,000 was too much to pay for a plantation. I told him he had to look at it not as a prime investment but as buying a way of life, a place where he could come and live six months of the year and sit with a view down through palms to the beach, moonlit water, and islands. Either that’s worth something or you might as well invest in a store at home.”
Taken all together, there is no doubt land concerns present a problem with black power political overtones. The fortunate thing is that many Europeans realize this. But those who do also include New Hebrideans.
Jimmy Stevens and secretary
The darkest cloud on the rosy European horizon in the New Hebrides in recent years has been presented by a native land movement headed by a part-Tongan, part-English New Hebridean with a flair for dramatics and informal organization.
Now almost 50s Jimmy Stevens wears the greying beard of a prophet and often a khaki uniform with the insignia of his organization, “Nagriamel,” derived from native words for two plants used in ceremonies and taboos in the northern islands. His followers, whom he numbers at some 15,000 (paying about $1 a year), call him Chief President Moses.
Stevens learned his basic English at a British mission school and acquired much of his pleasant savoir-faire driving a bulldozer in the American wartime days and later skippering an inter-island trading ship. His image as a semi-religious leader is flawed by a reputation of fondness for beer, expensive trips abroad, and numerous young wives.
But he has built up an attractive settlement of followers on what was undeveloped SFNH land on a rich plateau behind Luganville, and his message is not taken lightly.
Said Stevens in a talk we had: “We want all the land in nature reserve — what we call black bush — to come back to our people under Nagriamel. We don’t want the land that is planted or fenced, just what was taken and has not been planted.”
In practice this has meant mostly SFNH land. But in our talk Stevens mentioned land subdivided by Peacock, notably the undeveloped Cape Quiros, as “belonging” to Nagriamel. Some of his followers late last year pulled up surveyor’s stakes there and were later arrested.
It is hard to judge Stevens’ importance. The British draw a difference between his behavior and political ambitions (which he seems to have) and the significance of Nagriamel as an ideal with appeal. The French view seems to be that Stevens can and should be negotiated with, that deals can be made to satisfy all.
Stevens himself expressed interest in negotiating the claims he makes. He talked well of Americans but added, “They should realize who owns the land.”
Asked about the future, he first said, “I think there will be trouble. People can’t lose their land and Customs for nothing,” He went on to explain he meant at some future date, that the native people now are still more apathetic than upset. “I wish they were more alive,” he said shaking his head. “I think they are dead sometimes.”
That, of course, is only the view of one unusual New Hebridean of possibly diminishing personal importance. But several others made points like: “Stevens is symptomatic of something general… “There is some uneasiness…”
Here more than elsewhere you get the feeling that much depends on how things are handled by the small but economically commanding European minority. There are some reactionary types in the New Hebrides with dreams of “keeping the natives in line” forever. But, despite differences in timing and emphasis, both the dominant British and French government views seem positive.
For his part, Peacock seems to understand and have some progressive ideas: “There is no land shortage, but the people want somebody to guide them on how to use and develop their land. One of our projects is to help train them.” To ease the stigma of an all-American influx, efforts are being made to partly sell his latest subdivision in other parts of the world.
As One Leaves
So if the future here as elsewhere is uncertain, it is at least being thought about and worked at. The hope is that French economic ambition, British concern and pride, and American dreams can all be reconciled in a way that promotes native welfare. The alternative is not pleasant.
Meanwhile, life in the New Hebrides can still be happy and colorful. Old notes bring memories of a cocktail party at the hotel my last night in Santo. For the introduction of a new model Peugeot car, hundreds were on hand, from the top French and British officials to leading local Europeans to a tight circle of seated New Hebridean leaders to sophisticated Chinese and Vietnamese, all to the tune of music and popping corks from Mumms champagne. Many carried on to a nightspot owned by a Tahitian couple for wild dancing, drinking, talk — and fights. I fell in with a Tongan ship captain and his Fijian engineer who insisted on buying so much beer I finally had to sneak away while I could walk.
Next morning the hangovers were gathered at the hotel bar when I came out to settle up — the wounded French planter, a couple of New Zealand construction men, the Dutch captain of an inter-island trader, two Japanese fishermen, and the Australian manager who was downing snifters of brandy. We all bought drinks for each other until it was time to go. As I left the Frenchman was arguing with his friend, the captain: “You are lucky it is so early Sunday, or I would say —- —– It seemed very funny to everyone at the time.
Later as the plane took off and banked out for Guadalcanal in the Solomons, a big black fly buzzed on the inside of the window. Somehow, it went very well with the beauty of Santa far below.
Hog Harbor Village
Received in New York on September 25, 1970.
Mr. John Griffin is an Alicia Patterson Fund award winner on leave from the Honolulu Advertiser, Honolulu, Hawaii. This article may be published with credit to Mr. Griffin, the Honolulu Advertiser, and the Alicia Patterson Fund.
